Once the coronavirus reached Mississippi, officials began to take steps to slow the spread of the virus – urging social distancing, limiting public gatherings, closing schools and nonessential businesses – culminating in Gov. Tate Reeves’ shelter-in-place order.
Mississippians are adapting to a new reality. Here, readers share images showing how they are dealing with social distancing and quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic. View a slideshow of submitted photos below.
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Submit your photos to Eric Shelton here. Be sure to include where you live and where the photo was taken, the name of the person who took the photo, what’s happening in the photo and how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting you.
The sole abortion clinic in Mississippi is open and accepting appointments while fully complying with state orders about COVID-19, according to an organization that represents the clinic in legal matters.
The Jackson Women’s Health Organization became a focal point of the state’s coronavirus response this week after Gov. Tate Reeves signed an executive order banning all elective and non-urgent surgeries and procedures until April 27. Reeves said the move is intended to slow the spread of the virus and preserve protective gear for health workers.
But the order raised questions about how elective surgeries are defined and whether that definition includes abortions.
Specifically, the executive order states that licensed health care professionals and facilities, “shall postpone all surgeries and procedures that are not immediately medically necessary to correct a serious medical condition of, or to preserve the life of, a patient who without immediate performance of the surgery or procedure would be at risk for serious adverse medical consequences or death, as determined by the patient’s physician.”
In addition, the order states that it would not apply to procedures that do not “have the potential to deplete the hospital capacity, medical equipment or PPE needed to cope with the COVID-19 disaster.”
It was not immediately clear how abortions fit into the governor’s order. When a reporter pressed Reeves at a recent press conference on whether his order explicitly applies to abortions, Reeves only repeated the phrase, “It shuts down all elective surgeries.”
A spokeswoman for the nonprofit Center for Reproductive Rights, which has represented the Jackson clinic in lawsuits about recently passed anti-abortion laws, confirmed that the facility continues taking appointments. The center’s attorneys declined to comment further. Calls to the clinic, located in Jackson’s Fondren neighborhood, were not returned.
The Mississippi State Department of Health had already asked clinics to postpone elective surgeries and non-urgent appointments in mid-March to, “protect patients and health care professionals by minimizing potential exposure to COVID-19 and preserving valuable protective equipment.” But, at the time, the agency advised that clinicians were responsible for determining the necessity of each procedure.
Meanwhile, as states across the U.S. started preserving hospital beds and personal protective equipment for COVID treatment, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology issued a statement urging states against lumping abortion care with other procedures.
Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America
Gov. Tate Reeves and Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs speak to the media about the coronavirus during a press conference at the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, March 26, 2020.
“While most abortion care is delivered in outpatient settings, in some cases care may be delivered in hospital-based settings or surgical facilities. To the extent that hospital systems or ambulatory surgical facilities are categorizing procedures that can be delayed during the COVID-19 pandemic, abortion should not be categorized as such a procedure. Abortion is an essential component of comprehensive health care,” the statement reads.
“It is also a time-sensitive service for which a delay of several weeks, or in some cases days, may increase the risks or potentially make it completely inaccessible. The consequences of being unable to obtain an abortion profoundly impact a person’s life, health, and well-being.”
Most abortions in the state happen early in the first trimester and most are medicine-induced — through pills — rather than surgical. More than 90 percent of abortions in Mississippi in 2016 were performed before 14 weeks of gestation and 65 percent were before 9 weeks, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent data.
More than a quarter of abortions in the U.S. are medically delivered rather than surgically, while almost two-thirds of Mississippi’s abortions are delivered this way.
In recent years, the clinic has been at the center of several efforts of Mississippi’s Republican-led Legislature to more heavily restrict abortion in the state. Most of the bills have been struck down by federal courts because they violate the constitutional right to abortion granted under Roe v. Wade.
Reeves, who has championed anti-abortion legislation throughout his political career, has called for abortion access to be restricted during the coronavirus pandemic. In late March, Reeves vowed that his administration would take “whatever action we need to protect not only the lives of unborn children but also the lives of anyone who may contract this particular virus.”
Anticipating legal challenges, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves intervened shortly after the governor announced his order.
Judge Reeves, who previously blocked the state’s six- and 15-week abortion bans that are still winding through the federal courts, sent a letter to attorneys for the state and the clinic asking the state health officer to clarify whether elective surgeries apply to abortions.
Reeves — no relation to the governor, the judge noted in his letter — pointed to a similar order in Alabama, which would have also prohibited abortions. A federal judge there ruled that the state could not block abortions after Alabama’s health officer clarified that doctors should have ultimate discretion over a procedure’s necessity.
Thomas Dobbs, Mississippi’s top health official, told reporters Tuesday that he had not received Judge Reeves’ letter, adding the executive order applies to all ambulatory surgical centers. The health department regulates these 75 centers across the state, which specialize in same-day outpatient surgeries such as some knee surgeries, cataract procedures and biopsies. Dobbs added that his agency is preparing to issue guidance to these facilities about elective procedures.
“We’ll send out some guidelines that basically make sure that they (ambulatory surgical centers) understand what’s in the executive order and we will send them to every regulated ambulatory surgical center and expect for them to comply. That should be forthcoming pretty soon and we’re going to be evenhanded with everyone who falls under that regulatory scheme,” Dobbs said Tuesday.
The Jackson Women’s Health Organization is not licensed as an ambulatory surgical center, but as an abortion facility.
In 2012, the clinic sued the state to reverse several targeted regulations, including an “admitting privileges” requirement that abortion providers have a formal relationship with a local hospital to admit patients during an emergency. The clinic sued claiming the restriction was medically unnecessary and unconstitutional. Reproductive rights advocates and medical experts have called admitting privileges regulations harmful and restrictive, noting procedures with higher complication rates, like colonoscopies and liposuction, are not always restricted in the same way as abortion. They also cite that abortion has comparatively low complication rates.
The admitting privileges law was ultimately struck down. The case also renewed attention to restrictions conflating clinics’ licensure that was previously ruled unconstitutional. Jackson Women’s Health is not licensed as an ambulatory surgical clinic but does have to meet “minimum standards of operations” of such facilities. The clinic’s lawyers are still challenging the licensing mandate in the state’s ongoing federal legal lawsuits.
Should litigation follow Gov. Reeves’ executive order, a recent case from Texas might foreshadow the outcome.
After abortion-rights groups sued over that state’s pandemic abortion ban, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately ruled Monday that medication abortions, which are not considered procedures, could continue. Surgical abortions would be prohibited except for women who would not be able to have an abortion under Texas’ 20-week ban if they delayed the procedure.
The Jackson clinic does not perform abortion past 16 weeks, so the courts may have to sort out whether women in Mississippi would be granted a similar exception.
Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America
Attorney general candidate Lynn Fitch speaks during the Madison and Hinds County Republican Women candidate forum at The Lake House in Ridgeland, Miss., Monday, August 26, 2019.
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, whose office represents state agencies in legal matters, interprets the 5th Circuit decision as upholding state’s rights to block abortions currently, telling Mississippi Today via email she is prepared to defend the state.
“The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has just recently ruled that abortions should not be afforded a blanket exception to a Governor’s directive to prohibit non-essential services and conserve (personal protective equipment) and other resources needed to meet the health and safety needs of the people,” she said. “And I am prepared to defend our order just as strenuously in court.”
Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America
Sen. David Blount speaks to Getty Israel during a committee meeting about Medicaid at the Mississippi State Capitol Tuesday, February 4, 2020.
Recently Wisconsin Republican Robin Vos appeared decked out in full and much coveted medical personal protection equipment at a polling place. A video of Vos, the speaker of the state assembly, saying those voting and working at the polls at last week’s Wisconsin election faced “very minimal exposure,” has garnered considerable national attention.
Ironically, Vos was among the officials arguing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic should not be a reason to delay the election or to expand mail-in voting to protect the safety of Wisconsin voters.
For Mississippians, the video could portend the November general election. Everyone hopes that by November the state and country will have returned to a semblance of normalcy and that concerns about the coronavirus have subsided. But if they have not, Mississippians could face more voting obstacles than many in other states because Mississippi has some of the nation’s most restrictive regulations on absentee and early, in-person voting.
When the Legislature returns from its coronavirus-forced recess – presumably in May – Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, hopes lawmakers will take up and pass a proposal to expand the early voting options, at least during emergency situations such as a pandemic.
“Nobody knows what the conditions will be in November,” Blount said recently. “Everything might be OK. That would be great, but we need to listen to the health care experts. If things are not normal, we need to have safety precautions in place so everybody can vote and vote safely.”
When serving as secretary of state and overseeing elections, current Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann briefly endorsed no-excuse early voting and online voter registration. Hosemann endorsed the concepts based on the recommendations of a bi-partisan elections task force he created in 2014. But the proposals were blocked by the Republican legislative leadership and Hosemann’s support waned.
But Hosemann, who now presides over the Senate, said recently it might be time to revisit the issue.
“Significant cybersecurity and other concerns in recent years caused us to exercise caution in changing the absentee laws or allowing online voter registration,” Hosemann said. “The current COVID-19 crisis, however, is causing us to take a second look at these laws and other statutes which may need to be revised and updated.”
Gov. Tate Reeves, who has dealt with the coronavirus, tornadoes and other crises during his first three months in office, indicated recently that issues in November are not currently high on his list of priorities.
“As we move through the summer into the fall, we will do everything we possibly can to ensure that every Mississippian who wants to vote has the opportunity to vote,” Reeves said.
Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton, echoed similar sentiments.
“While that is something to be taken into consideration at the appropriate time, right now the focus is on getting past the health crisis as well as addressing the needs of Mississippians affected by the Easter Sunday storms that devastated parts of our state,” Gunn said.
But if the expansion of early voting is not addressed during a resumed 2020 session, the governor would have to call a special session before the election to expand early voting.
“None of us know what the conditions will be in November,” Blount reiterated.
He said there is a bill alive in the Senate dealing with absentee voting issues that he believes could be amended when the session resumes to deal with the possible emergency. In its current form, the bill makes changes to the state absentee voting law to prevent people who vote early from changing their minds and then voting on election day.
Mississippi is among nine states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, that do not allow some form of no-excuse early voting. And according to Represent Us, a national non-profit promoting mail-in voting, Mississippi is one of only eight states not to have taken at least temporary action to allow mail-in voting. Neighboring Alabama is one of the latest to have taken such action.
Under current law in Mississippi, people who will be away from their home area on election day, the disabled, those over the age of 65 and a few other groups are allowed to vote early.
Blount said that should be expanded at least in case of an emergency like the pandemic. He also said perhaps more locations for in-person, early voting should be provided. Currently, in-person early voting, which also is confined to those away from home on election day, older voters and the disabled, is allowed only in the local circuit clerks’ offices.
Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson, who opposed no-excuse early voting during his successful election campaign in 2019, said whether to expand early voting because of the pandemic is a decision for the Legislature.
“As for our November plans, we’ve been studying the right approach and our office has asked for input from our circuit clerks and (local) election commissioners,” he said. “We’re a bottom-up state, meaning our elections are handled on the local level, so I did not want to make a decision without asking those on the frontline of our election operations for their thoughts and ideas.”
Watson pointed out that the governor has postponed a Republican runoff election for the U.S. House District 2 post that was scheduled in March and has rescheduled a state House election called to fill a vacated seat.
In postponing the special House election on March 30, Reeves said, “The health and well-being of all Mississippians must and always will be our top priority. We are closer to the beginning than the end of this outbreak, and conducting an election at this time would unnecessarily put our poll workers and voters at risk. We must protect our rights as Americans to a free and fair election, but not at the expense of the health and safety of our people. Stay home, stay healthy.”
Older generations haven’t had access to digital literacy education — these workshops are changing that
We hear a lot these days about “fake news,” but research shows that older adults genuinely struggle with being able to identify what stories are true versus what stories are fabricated. During an election year, being able to make this distinction is incredibly important. To that end, digital literacy workshops are quickly sprouting up all over the country, designed to help people of older generations understand the importance of fact-checking.
According to an NPR story, workshops like “How to Spot Fake News,” sponsored by a nonprofit called Senior Planet, are teaching older adults how to check sites like Snopes and FactCheck.org to determine if the stories they’re reading are based in fact or false propaganda.
Researchers found Facebook users 65 and over posted 7 times as many articles from fake news websites, compared to adults under 29.
A workshop called “How to Spot Fake News” is teaching these folks how to fact-check stories — and identify disinformation.
One participant, 86-year-old Marlene Cianci, is delighted at how simple it to do. “It’s right there!” she exclaims. “Just a two-step thing and there it was!”
A Princeton study about fake news and who shares it concluded that, of those participating, only three percent of people aged 18-29 shared links from fake news sites, compared with 11 percent of those older than age 65. Critically, the association with age appears to be independent of respondents’ ideological or partisan affiliations. And, rather than contribute to already stagnant societal ageism, workshops like these seek to solve the problems at hand by tailoring digital literacy lessons to its audience.
“If seniors are more likely to share fake news than younger people, then there are important implications for how we might design interventions to reduce the spread of fake news,” said Andrew Guess, an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Research also shows that confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret or mold new information in a way that confirms prior-held beliefs, grows stronger with age. Isolation can be a factor, too, meaning seniors are more likely to be alone, perusing the Internet and hitting the share button, per NPR. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, people 65 and older will soon be the largest age group in the United States. That age group also tends to have the highest voter turnout.
Jonathan Nagler, a professor of politics at NYU and a co-director of New York University’s Social Media and Political Participation Lab, says that “these findings suggest that teaching digital literacy in schools — no matter how beneficial that might be for other reasons — is unlikely to fully address the sharing of fake news if such sharing is more prevalent among older citizens.”
This is why workshops designed to help older adults are critical, especially this year. The study outlines the correlation between digital media literacy and other skills that are directly related to social media sharing behavior. Many local libraries all over the country offer workshops and classes like this, free of charge to the community.
“Susceptibility to any kind of fraud or deception is not unique to older adults, although research suggests that emotions play a strong role in older adults’ behavioral intentions,” Katelyn Frey, Ph.D. student and instructor in the Adult Development and Aging program at the University of Akron, says. “When designing media literacy interventions for this population, assessing emotional states while perusing digital content may be a useful strategy. I believe these workshops could be useful for people of all ages.”
NASA’s Plan to Build a Base Camp on the Moon Sounds Like Sci-Fi, But It’s Real
If we’re ever going to make Elon Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars a reality, we first need to figure out an essential component of the plan: how to get there. After all, it’s somewhere between 34 and 140 million miles away from Earth. The moon is barely spitting distance closer, relatively speaking—but it’s a start. More importantly, it’s the place most similar to Mars that humans are currently able to reach (in that it’s barren, desolate, and not Earth).
That’s just one reason NASA is planning to build a new lunar base camp. In a report released last week, the agency laid out its multi-phase plan for what it’s calling the Artemis program, which will be the core of its spaceflight and exploration endeavors for the next decade. Artemis’s goals cover three domains: low-Earth orbit, the moon, and Mars.
It all starts with robots. In 2021, two robotic missions will deliver scientific and commercial payloads to the moon. In one of the project’s more meta aspects, a robotic mission will also deliver a new robotic lunar rover. It’s called the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER, thank goodness for acronyms), and it has the word “polar” in it because this is all going to be based at the moon’s south pole, somewhere near the 12-mile-wide by 2-mile-deep Shackleton Crater. VIPER and other lunar rovers will wander around the moon’s surface looking for resources humans will need in order to spend any significant amount of time there, like oxygen and water.
Speaking of putting humans on the moon—which is slated to happen in 2024—here’s how it would work. Four astronauts at a time would fly in an Orion spacecraft to the planned Gateway space station (sort of like the moon’s version of the International Space Station, and SpaceX will be one of various contractors bringing cargo to it). After uncrewed and crewed flight tests—Artemis I and II, respectively, whose flight distances will together total almost a million miles—Artemis III will be the mission that finally lands people on the moon.
Once they’re there, NASA envisions astronauts staying on the moon for up to a week at a time to start. The south pole base camp they’ll dock at will include a lunar terrain vehicle (if you’re picturing a moon version of an ATV, you’re probably not too far off) for them to move around in, and a “habitable mobility platform,” essentially a much larger pressurized vehicle on which astronauts could stay for 45 days at a time.
Once operations on the moon are expanded and astronauts can stay there for longer (will we ever end up with something resembling the 2019 film Ad Astra, where arrivals to the moon are greeted with a strip mall complete with McDonald’s?), the Mars piece of the Artemis plan would kick in.
Just as robots will deliver robots to the moon before humans go there, the same would subsequently happen on Mars: robots first, humans later.
One idea is for a four-person crew to live on the Gateway station for a few months to simulate an outbound trip to Mars, with two of those crew members then traveling to the lunar surface while the other two stay on the Gateway. After the two moon explorers return to the station, all four crew members would hunker down for another multi-month stay there to simulate the return trip to Earth. And you thought being shut in your house for a few weeks was bad…
And here’s one final detail to know about project Artemis. In a (hard-won) nod to gender equality, the program was named after the Greek goddess of the hunt and the moon. In Greek mythology, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo, for whom the first moon missions were named (and memorialized by Tom Hanks for those of us who weren’t alive at the time). NASA chose the name Artemis as a gesture of inclusion; the agency intends to land the first woman on the moon as part of this multi-faceted project.
You can read all the specifics of project Artemis here.
Pop-Up Coronavirus Labs and a 5-Minute Test Take Aim at the Testing Void
Two and a half months after the first confirmed novel coronavirus case in the US, the virus has invaded the country’s east and west coasts and is quickly making its way into the center of the country. As the case tally swells and hospitals brace themselves for surges, one factor has remained stubbornly, ludicrously constant: we don’t have enough tests.
In fact, far from simply not having enough tests, we have a massive and debilitating shortage of them. Widespread testing was a key piece of the strategy used by countries most successful in combating the virus, like Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. If we knew who was sick and who wasn’t, or where the infection clusters were located, we’d be able to more selectively shut down the economy rather than using the blanket approach we’re currently employing. We’re essentially making decisions in an information vacuum when we should be making them based on thorough analytics.
But there’s hope this could soon change. Academia and private industry have moved to fill the testing void, with two particularly encouraging developments announced this week. Here are the details.
Pop-Up Labs
Jennifer Doudna is widely considered the “founder” of gene editing technique CRISPR. She’s now leading a pop-up testing lab at UC Berkeley that’s pulling together over 100 scientists and volunteers from Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute and nearby institutions.
To be able to test patient samples, labs and scientists need to meet federal requirements under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) program. Thanks to an acceleration of the certification process by the FDA, the lab should be fully certified by next week, and can start testing patient samples at that time.
The team will use a polymerase chain reaction test (more on that later) run on machines that can analyze over 300 samples at a time. They plan to process 1,000 tests per day to start, eventually going up to 3,000 per day. Estimated time from receiving patient samples to having a definitive diagnostic is a mere four hours, aided by robotic sample handling and automated test-running.
Illinois-based Abbott Labs’ ID NOW platform—a toaster-sized machine that quickly analyzes patient samples to detect illnesses—is already used in urgent care clinics and emergency rooms across the country. Normally used to detect conditions like strep throat or the flu, the system was cleared to test for Covid-19 by the FDA last week. A week prior, the company also launched Covid-19 testing on a platform that’s used in hospitals and labs.
Abbott has a test delivery target of 50,000 per day, and with positive results showing up within 5 minutes and negative results within 13 minutes, it’s the fastest test we’ve seen; compared to the 7-day turnaround time of the initial test produced by the CDC, this seems quasi-miraculous. Between its two platforms, Abbott plans to produce a total of five million tests in April.
Is that enough for what we need to effectively fight this virus and get society up and running again as soon as possible? Not even close. According to the Washington Post, as of March 28 the US was testing at a rate of 2,249.9 tests per million people; South Korea was at more than triple that rate with 7,576.7 tests per million people.
But Berkeley’s, Abbott’s, and all the other tests springing up from research centers and private companies are something—which is better than the gaping void of nothing we’ve had up until now.
Virus Detection 101
So how do these tests work? What happens during the minutes or hours it takes for a sample to be analyzed and a diagnosis produced?
In brief, the tests are looking for viral genetic material, and if it’s present, they use chemicals to multiply it and make it detectable in a fail-safe way. Picture the coronavirus as a pincushion full of needles. Chemicals called reagents are added to a patient sample, and these reagents get past the needles and cause the pincushion to crack open, releasing the virus’s RNA.
Adding an enzyme to the RNA causes it to convert to DNA, which is then replicated using additional reagents, enzymes, and temperature changes in a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Two DNA strands become four, which then become eight, and the cycle continues until there are around 100 billion copies of the viral DNA. Each time a strand is copied, a fluorescent probe appears; a sample glowing with fluorescence, then, is unmistakably full of viral DNA—and that means a positive test result (and immediate isolation of the person who was just tested!).
Hurdles to Clear
Despite this commendable work by scientists and a necessary loosening of government regulations, it’s unfortunately likely that testing shortages will continue. We’ve never before been in a situation where so many people needed to be tested so quickly, and thus demand for items like reagents and swabs is far outpacing the supply chain’s ability to deliver.
In addition, the tests discussed here can only detect Covid-19 in people who have the virus at the time of testing; in other words, a different test (called an antibody test) is needed to identify people who had mild or asymptomatic cases of the virus—these people could be immune without even knowing it.
There’s no easy answer to this virus, a fact we’ve become painfully aware of over the past few weeks. But if all we can do is take baby steps towards a solution, it should comfort us to know that the best scientific minds among us are doing just that.
Do We Have to Give Up Our Personal Freedoms to Beat Coronavirus?
In late December 2019 Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, sent a WeChat message to his medical school alumni group telling them that seven people with severe respiratory and flu-like symptoms had recently been admitted to the hospital. One thing they had in common, besides their symptoms, was that they’d all visited a local wet market at some point in the previous week.
The illness bore an uncanny resemblance to SARS, but with a novel aspect as well; could it be an outbreak of a new disease? If so, what should be done?
But before any of the doctors could take action or alert local media outlets, the chat thread was shut down by the Wuhan police and Li was accused of spreading rumors. Mind you, the chat wasn’t in a public forum; it was a closed group exchange. But the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is able to monitor, intercept, and censor any and all activity on WeChat; for the Chinese people, there’s no such thing as a private conversation.
The police gave Li an affidavit stating he’d spread false information and disturbed public order. He was instructed to sign this document retracting his warning about the virus and to stop telling people it existed, otherwise he’d be put in jail.
So he did. A little over a month later, on February 7, Li died of the novel coronavirus in the same hospital where he’d worked—he’d been infected with the virus while trying to treat sick patients, who’d continued pouring into the hospital throughout the month of January.
By this time the CCP had leapt into action, unable to deny the existence of the virus as hundreds then thousands of people started getting sick. Travel restrictions and quarantines went into effect—but it was already far too late. As of this writing, the virus has spread to 168 countries and killed almost 21,000 people. Schools and businesses are closed. We’re in lockdown mode in our homes. And the economy is taking a massive hit that could lead to a depression.
How different might our current situation be if the CCP had heeded Li’s warning instead of silencing it—or if the virus had first been discovered in a country with a free press?
“People are arguing that China has done a good job of handling the virus. I disagree,” said Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation. “The reason we have this global pandemic right now is because of Chinese censorship and the government’s totalitarian nature.”
Last week at Singularity University’s virtual summit on COVID-19, Gladstein pointed out what we can learn from various governments’ responses to this pandemic—and urged us to keep a close eye on our freedoms as this crisis continues to unfold.
Open, Competent, or Neither?
The rate at which this disease has spread in different countries has varied wildly, as have the numbers of deaths vs. recoveries. Western Europe houses some of the wealthier and more powerful countries on Earth, but now isn’t a great time to be living there (and we’re not doing so hot in the US, either). And though Singapore is known for its rigidity, it was a good place to be when the virus hit.
“Given a half-century of research, the correlation is strong: democracies handle public health disasters much better than dictatorships,” Gladstein said, citing a February 18th article in The Economist that examines deaths from epidemics compared to GDP per person in democracies and non-democracies.
Taiwan has also fared well, as has South Korea, though their systems of government function quite differently than Singapore’s. So what factors may have contributed to how fast the virus has spread and how hard the economy’s been hit in these nations?
There are two axes that are relevant, Gladstein said. One is the openness of a society and the other is its competency. An open but less competent government is likely to perform poorly in a public health crisis (or any crisis), as is a competent but closed government.
“Long-term, some of the best-performing societies are open, competent democracies like Korea and Taiwan,” Gladstein said. Taiwan is a somewhat striking example given its proximity to China and the amount of travel between the two.
Success Here, Failure There
With a population of 23 million people and the first case confirmed on January 21, as of this writing Taiwan has had 235 cases and 2 deaths. They immediately started screening people coming from China and halted almost all incoming travel from China within weeks of the outbreak, creating a risk-level alert system by integrating data from the national health insurance database with the immigration and customs databases (this did involve a degree of privacy infringement that we probably wouldn’t be comfortable with in the US; more on that later). High-risk people were quarantined at home, and the government quickly requisitioned the manufacture of millions of masks. “There was less panic and more belief in the government, and this paints a picture of what we should all aspire to,” Gladstein said.
Iran is on the opposite end of the spectrum in both competency and openness; they’ve recorded over 27,000 cases and over 2,000 deaths. “Thousands have died in Iran, but we’ll never know the truth because there’s no free press there,” said Gladstein.
Then there’s China. In addition to lockdowns enforced by “neighborhood leaders” and police, the government upped its already-heavy citizen surveillance, tracking people’s locations with apps like AliPay and WeChat. A color-coding system indicating people’s health status and risk level was implemented, and their movement restricted accordingly.
“They’ve now used the full power of the state to curtail the virus, and from what we know, they’ve been relatively effective,” Gladstein said. But, he added, this comes with two caveats: one, the measures China has taken would be “unthinkable” in a democracy; and two, we can’t take their data at face value due to the country’s lack of a free press or independent watchdogs (in fact, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post were expelled from China on March 17; this may have been a sort of retaliation for the US State Department’s recent move to cap the number of Chinese journalists allowed to work in the US for a handful of Chinese state media outlets).
Surveillance = Success?
South Korea and Singapore, the world’s other two containment success stories, both used some form of surveillance to fight the virus. In Korea, the 2015 MERS outbreak resulted in a law that lets the government use smartphone and credit card data to see where people have been then share that information (stripped of identifying details) on apps so that people they may have infected know to go get tested.
In Singapore, besides launching a contact tracing app called TraceTogether, the government sent text messages to people who’d been ordered to stay at home and required them to respond with their live GPS location. As of this writing, Singapore had reported 631 cases and 2 deaths.
Does the success of these countries and their use of surveillance mean we need to give up some of our privacy to fight this disease? Would Americans and Europeans be willing to do so if it meant this terrible ordeal would be over sooner? And how do we know where to draw the line?
Would you be willing to sacrifice some of your privacy and personal liberties, such as having your whereabouts more closely tracked (via GPS on your phone and your credit card transactions) and input into a public database, if it meant coronavirus would be stopped sooner? — Singularity University (@singularityu) March 26, 2020
Temporary May Be Tricky
To Gladstein, the answer is simple. “We don’t need a police state to fight public health disasters,” he said. “We should be very wary about governments telling us they need to take our liberties away to keep us safe, and that they’ll only take those liberties away for a limited amount of time.”
A lot of personal data is already being collected about each of us, every day: which ads we click on, how long we spend on different websites, which terms we search for, and even where we go and how long we’re there for. Would it be so terrible to apply all that data to stemming the spread of a disease that’s caused our economy to grind to a halt?
One significant issue with security measures adopted during trying times is that those measures are often not scaled back when society returns to normal. “During the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the government said the new security measures were temporary, but they turned out to be permanent,” Gladstein said.
Similarly, writes Yuval Noah Harari in a Financial Times piece (which you should read immediately in its entirety if you haven’t already), “Temporary measures have a nasty habit of outlasting emergencies, especially as there is always a new emergency lurking on the horizon.” Many of the emergency measures enacted during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, he adds, were never lifted.
Testing, Transparency, Trust
This is key: though surveillance was a critical part of Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore’s success, widespread testing, consistent messaging, transparency, and trust were all equally critical. In an excellent piece in Wired, Andrew Leonard writes, “In the United States, the Trump administration ordered federal health authorities to treat high-level discussions on the coronavirus as classified material. In Taiwan, the government has gone to great lengths to keep citizens well informed on every aspect of the outbreak.”
In South Korea, President Moon Jae-in minimized his own communications with the public, ceding the sharing of information to those who actually knew it: health officials updated the public on the state of the pandemic twice a day. Singapore’s government provided consistent, clear updates on the number and source of cases in the country.
Gladstein re-emphasized that democracies are better suited than dictatorships at handling public health crises because people need to be able to innovate and collaborate without fear.
But despite a high level of openness that includes democratic elections, some of the heaviest emphasis on individual rights and freedoms in the world, and a free press, the US response to coronavirus has been dismal. As of this writing, more than 25 US states have ordered residents to be on lockdown. But testing, trust, and transparency are all sorely lacking. As more people start to fall seriously ill in the coming days and weeks, what will the US do to stem Covid-19’s spread?
“Secrecy, lies, and censorship only help the virus,” Gladstein said. “We want open societies.” This open society is about to be put to the test—big-time.
After Coronavirus the World Will Never Be the Same. But Maybe, It Can Be Better
Life has changed a lot in the past few days, weeks, or months, depending where you live. As efforts to contain the novel coronavirus ramp up, it’s likely going to change even more. But we’re already sick of being at home all the time, we miss our friends and families, everything’s been canceled, the economy is tanking, and we feel anxious and scared about what’s ahead.
We just want this to be over, and we figure it’s only a matter of time. We’re making plans for what we’ll do when things go back to normal—and banking on that happening.
But what if life never fully goes back to how it was pre-coronavirus? What if this epidemic is a turning point, and after it the world is never the same?
More importantly—or, at least, more optimistically—what if the world could come out of this crisis better than it was before?
Jamie Metzl, technology and healthcare futurist, geopolitical expert, entrepreneur, author of Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity, and Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, thinks this is possible—but it all depends on what we do and how we behave right now. In a talk at Singularity University’s virtual summit on COVID-19 last week, Metzl explained why he believes that we’re never going “back to normal”—and what we should be doing now to make the new normal a good one.
Marks of History
For many of us, the most impactful geopolitical event that’s happened during our lifetime was the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The world changed that day, and it’s never returned to how it was before.
A flu-like pandemic with a relatively low mortality rate may seem minor compared to the deliberate murder of thousands of innocent people. But, Metzl said, “It’s my contention that this isn’t a 2001 moment, this is something much bigger. I think of this as a 1941 moment.”
1941 was the thick of World War II. Nobody knew what the outcome of the war was going to be, everybody was terrified, and the US and its allies were losing the war. “But even in the height of those darkest of times,” Metzl said, “people began imagining what the future world would look.”
It was 1941 when President Roosevelt gave his famous Four Freedoms speech, and when American and British leadership issued the Atlantic Charter, which set out their vision for the post-war international order. To this day, our lives exist within that order.
The situation we’re in right now is, of course, different; it’s not a war. It is, in Metzl’s words, “a convergence of the worlds of science and biology and the world of geopolitics.” And as the coronavirus crisis continues to play out, its geopolitical implications are going to become much greater.
The Old World Is Dying
Metzl shared a quote from Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci, written in the 1930s: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
Oof—that’s a big statement.
Metzl deconstructed it. For starters, he said, the post-WWII order that we’ve all grown up with was dying before this virus appeared.
Post-WWII planners envisioned a world that shared sovereignty and curbed nationalism. But we’re now in a period of dramatic re-nationalization of the world, with populist, extremist, or authoritarian leaders in power from Brazil to the US to China, and many countries in between.
Institutions intended to foster global cooperation (like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization) have been starved in the context of this re-nationalization, and as a result we don’t have effective structures in place to address global crises—and not just coronavirus. Think of climate change, protecting the oceans, preparing for a future of automation and AI; no country can independently take on or solve these massive challenges.
Not all is lost, though. “There are some positive pieces of this globalization story that we also need to be mindful of,” Metzl said.
When the Spanish flu pandemic hit in 1918, there were only 2 billion people on Earth, and of those 2 billion only 30 percent were literate; the “brain pool” for solving problems was about 600 million people.
Now we have a global population of 7.5 billion and an 86 percent literacy rate, which means over 6.5 billion people can be part of the effort to fix what’s broken. Just as crucially, we’re more connected to each other than we’ve ever been. It used to take thousands of years for knowledge to transfer; now it can fly across the world over the internet in minutes. “The pandemic moves at the speed of globalization, but so does the response,” Metzl said. “The tools we’re bringing to this fight are greater than anything our ancestors could have possibly imagined.”
But at the same time we’re experiencing this incredible bottom-up energy and connectivity, we’re also experiencing an abysmal failure of our top-down institutions.
Now Is the Time of Monsters
Have you felt afraid these last few days and weeks? I sure have. The stock market has plummeted, some people are losing their jobs, others are getting sick, and we don’t know the way out or how how long it’s going to last. In the meantime, a lot of unexpected things will happen.
There will be an economic slowdown or recession, and there will be issues with our healthcare systems—and these are just the predictable things. Metzl believes we’ll also see significant second and third-order effects. If the poorer parts of the world get hit hard by the virus, we may see fragile states collapsing, and multi-lateral states like the European Union unable to support the strain. “Our democracies are going to be challenged, and there may be soft coups even here in the US,” Metzl said. Speaking of challenges to democracy, there are actors whose desires and aspirations are very different from our own, and this could be a moment of opportunity for them.
“The world is not going to snap back to being exactly like it was before this crisis happened,” Metzl said. “We’re going to come out of this into a different world.”
The New World Struggles to Be Born
We don’t know exactly what that world will look like, but we can imagine some of it. Basically, take the trends that were already in motion and hit the fast-forward button. Virtualization of events, activities, and interactions. Automation of processes and services. Political and economic decentralization.
But for the pieces of the future that we’re unsure of, now is 1941. “Now is the time when we need to think about what we would like the new world to look like, and start planning for it and building it,” Metzl said.
In hindsight, it’s easy to picture a far better response and outcome to the COVID-19 outbreak. What if, three months ago, there’d been a global surveillance system in place, and at the first signs of the outbreak, an international emergency team led by the World Health Organization had immediately gone to Wuhan?
“We—all of us—need to re-invigorate a global system that can engage people inclusively across differences and across countries,” Metzl said. “We need to be articulating our long-term vision now so that we can evaluate everything against that standard.”
There’s not a total lack of a positive long-term vision now; the UN sustainable development goals, for example, call for gender equality, no poverty, no hunger, decent work, climate action, and justice (among other goals) around the world.
The problem is that we don’t have institutions meaningful enough or strong enough to effect realization of these principles; there’s a mismatch between the global nature of the problems we’re facing and the structure of national politics.
Building the New Normal
Just as our old normal was the new normal for our grandparents in the mid-1900s, this new normal that feels so shocking to us right now will simply be normal for our children and grandchildren. But there are some critical—and wonderful—differences between the mid-1900s and now.
We have more educated people, stronger connections, faster sharing of information, and more technological tools and scientific knowledge than ever before in history. “The number of people who can be part of this conversation is unprecedented,” Metzl said. “We couldn’t have done this in the industrial age or even the nuclear age. There’s never been this kind of motivation combined with this capacity around the world.”
In 1941, the global planning process was top-down: a small group of powerful, smart people decided how things would be then took steps to make their vision a reality. But this time will be different; to succeed, the new global plan will need to have meaningful drive from the bottom up.
“We need to recognize a new locus of power,” Metzl said. “And it’s us. Nobody is going to solve this for us. This is our moment to really come together.”
